Fonda dishes on Hanoi, her dad and the 'disease to please'

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Jane Fonda at a book signing of her memoir, "My Life So Far," last night at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park.

Jane Fonda at a book signing of her memoir, "My Life So Far," last night at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park.

Photo: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Fonda may have been the desirable starlet in "Barbarella" (with John Phillip Law), but she says that she was uncomfortable with her sexuality as a young woman.

Fonda may have been the desirable starlet in "Barbarella" (with John Phillip Law), but she says that she was uncomfortable with her sexuality as a young woman.

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In her memoir, Jane Fonda writes that the photo at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in 1972 still haunts her.

In her memoir, Jane Fonda writes that the photo at a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in 1972 still haunts her.

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Fonda says she struggled with body-image issues.

Fonda says she struggled with body-image issues.

Fonda dishes on Hanoi, her dad and the 'disease to please'

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Outside Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, it was deja vu all over again yesterday afternoon, a strange time trip as the Jane Fonda book tour raced through Seattle.

A handful of protesters brandished anti-Fonda signs, including "Once a Traitor, Always a Traitor!" and "Vets Not Fonda Fonda." Outside too stood scores of Fonda fans and admirers, waiting their chance to get the activist actress' autograph in her new memoir, "My Life So Far" (Random House, 579 pages, $26.95), the top-selling non-fiction book in the country.

(Note: The protestors' slogans and the title of Fonda's book were misstated in the original version of this article.)

It was almost as if the 1980s and 1990s had never happened. It was Jane Fonda back enflaming passions and positions, Jane Fonda proving once again to be, like Bill Clinton, someone either celebrated or vilified with a vast, vacant middle ground between the opposing partisans.

"The reason is that there is still the recurrent notion that the Vietnam War could have been won," Fonda said during a one-on-one interview in a quiet office in the recesses of the bookstore. "The right still needs a lightning rod -- and I'm it."

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But Fonda was also heartened by the reception she has been receiving from vets in her audiences, in her signing lines and on talk radio. She believes that "My Life So Far" is changing hearts and minds about her, even if she was spat upon last week in Kansas City in a well-publicized bookstore incident perpetrated by an angry man who said he was a Marine vet of Vietnam.

"What happened in Kansas City was no big deal," Fonda stressed. "Hundreds of vets are not that way. They have forgiven and forgotten and moved on with their lives."

To some, of course, she will always be "Hanoi Jane," forever reviled for her trip to North Vietnam in the waning days of the war and her decision to take the seat on an anti-aircraft emplacement outside Hanoi, the same seat that some North Vietnamese trooper would have taken in an attempt to shoot down American warplanes.

"It was my mistake," Fonda writes, "and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it. ... The two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until I die. But the gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead -- I simply wasn't thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling -- innocent of what the photo implies. Yet the photo exists, delivering its message, regardless of what I was really doing or thinking ... I carry this heavy in my heart. I always will."

"My Life So Far" at least supplies context to the notorious photo. It shows how Fonda on her tour through North Vietnam followed in the footsteps of a couple hundred other Americans who visited enemy territory, shows also how it was not even on the national controversy radar in the initial months after her visit. It did not inflame passions until Fonda made an angry, misinterpreted statement upon the return of American prisoners of war from Vietnam that set in motion the notion of "Hanoi Jane," kept alive by anti-Jane forces through postings on the Internet.

But what her memoir really reveals about her notorious photo from Hanoi is that it was one more instance of Fonda trying desperately to please others. In that case, it was her North Vietnamese hosts and the soldiers at the anti-aircraft emplacement who had greeted her with a song, and she felt on the spot to reciprocate somehow.

Fonda herself recognizes that this "disease to please" may well be the dominant theme in her 67 years of life, which have seen so many incarnations and so many seismic shifts that they make the proverbial nine lives of a cat seem paltry by comparison. She was especially vulnerable to trying to please men, including her three prominent husbands (French film director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden, media mogul Ted Turner).

After her mother's suicide when Fonda was still a young girl, after her father's chilly distance throughout his life, Fonda did everything to please others in hopes of receiving validation of who she was and why she mattered. She lost herself, a stranger in her own life, trying so hard to be the perfect wife or the perfect actress, yet wracked by self-doubts and a two-decade struggle with eating disorders that she kept secret from everyone.

"My efforts to try and be perfect meant denying who I am in the effort to please others," Fonda commented. "I felt I had to do that in order to keep a man. And the thing that people seem to find odd in my book and in my talks today is how I seemed so successful, so self-sufficient, yet in my relationships, those efforts cost me my own voice. That's why I'm telling my story now -- I want people, especially women, to see how insidious such efforts to please others can be."

"My Life So Far" is a riveting memoir, filled with startling revelations of the sort that celebrities of Fonda's stature usually avoid. About the only places where she admits to reining in her candor is in not naming her lover in an affair during her marriage to Hayden and in not being too specific in detailing exactly "what was not working" in her relationship with Turner.

Otherwise, the candor in Fonda's memoir is often shocking, frequently harrowing and sometimes mystifying. Even in this tell-all age, Fonda may have set a new standard for airing her laundry in public, no matter how tattered or soiled.

Early headlines prompted in the book's first blaze of publicity, as Fonda made the rounds of so many national TV shows, may have focused on her sexual threesomes with other women and Vadim during their time in France and what she felt during those times, or how she came to be on that North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun and what she could possibly have been thinking. But other revelations abound.

Fonda reveals how she was so uncomfortable with her sexuality as a maturing young woman that she thought she might be "a boy inside a girl's body" and often examined herself in the mirror "to see if there was any signs of a penis."

Fonda writes that all of her husbands were unfaithful to her, that she never believed she was a good mother, that she often despised her acting profession for its shallowness and its celebrity.

Fonda reveals how the "happiest moment" in her life was when she was able to present his first Oscar to her ailing father, Henry Fonda, for his performance in "On Golden Pond," which her company had produced in hopes of giving the stellar actor his last shot at the Academy Award. Yet the only response that she received from her father after the Oscars were announced was his great pleasure that their co-star in the picture, Katherine Hepburn, had also won an Oscar for her performance in the film.

Fonda professes no great disappointment that her own efforts in getting that film made or acting in it received no acknowledgement from her father, even in their private conversations during the five remaining months of his life.

"By then," Fonda said yesterday, "I realized that he was like other men of his generation in that he was uncomfortable in dealing with his feelings. I felt empathy for him by then; he did the best he could."

No one is likely to read "My Life So Far" and accuse Fonda of being "uncomfortable in dealing with her feelings." Her memoir lapses into some analysis babble after her years of therapy ("It felt archetypal. Something in me was being slain in the fires of pain ..."), but her feelings are always revealed.

Fonda may appear worn from her time on the road these days, may come across as clipped and chilly in interviews out of the spotlight.

But there is no way to miss her serenity with herself in what she describes as the third act of her life.

She has embraced the Christian faith. And she has completed five years of intense reflection in the writing of her memoir herself, examining her successes but more often her failures in minute detail. She is convinced she is finally at peace with herself and who she is, even in her frequent times alone.

"If I don't fall in love again, that would be sad," she stressed. "But I'll still be fine with that. Back in the past, I would have been in a panic about being alone. No more."